Comment by sy26
16 hours ago
I have been confused for a long time why FB is not motivated enough to invest in world models, it IS the key to unblock their "metaverse" vision. And instead they let go Yann LeCun.
16 hours ago
I have been confused for a long time why FB is not motivated enough to invest in world models, it IS the key to unblock their "metaverse" vision. And instead they let go Yann LeCun.
LeCun wasn't producing results. He was obstinate and insistent on his own theories and ideas which weren't, and possibly aren't, going anywhere. He refused to engage with LLMs and compete in the market that exists, and spent all his effort and energy on unproven ideas and research, which split the company's mission and competitiveness. They lost their place as one of the top 4 AI companies, and are now a full generation behind, in part due to the split efforts and lack of enthusiastic participation by all the Meta AI team. If you look at the chaos and churn at the highest levels across the industry, there's not a lot of room for mission creep by leadership, and LeCun thoroughly demonstrated he wasn't suited for the mission desired by Meta.
I think he's lucky he got out with his reputation relatively intact.
To be fair, this was his job description: Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab. Not AI products division. You can't expect marketable products from a fundamental AI research lab.
It's "Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research", not fundamental. So basically involves both fundamental and applied research.
[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/category/ai-research/
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Were you there or just an attentive outsider?
Attentive outsider and acquaintance of a couple people who are or were employed there. Nothing I'm saying is particularly inside baseball, though, it's pretty well covered by all the blogs and podcasts.
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Most serious researchers want to work on interesting problems like reinforcement learning or robotics or RNN or dozen other avant-garde subjects. None want to work on "boring" LLM technology, requiring significant engineering effort and huge dataset wrangling effort.
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In an industry of big bets, especially considering the company has poured resources and renamed itself to secure a place in the VR world... staking your reputation on everyone's LLMs having peaked and shifting focus to finding a new path to AI is a pretty interesting bet, no?
Since a hot take is as good as the next one: LLMs are by the day more and more clearly understood as a "local maximum" with flawed capabilities, limited efficiency, a $trillion + a large chunk of the USA's GDP wasted, nobody even turning a profit from that nor able to build something that can't be reproduced for free within 6 months.
When the right move (strategically, economically) is to not compete, the head of the AI division acknowledging the above and deciding to focus on the next breakthrough seems absolutely reasonable.
You really need to be obstinate in your convictions if you can dismiss LLMs at the time when everyone's job is being turned around by them. Everywhere I look, everyone I talk to, is using LLMs more and more to do their job and dramatically increase their productivity. It's one of the most successful technologies I've ever witnessed arriving on the market, and it's only just started- it's just three years old.
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It's insane that you can argue this in a world where facebook continues to be state of the art (and it's not even close) on semantic segmentation. Those SAM models they produce deliver more value than a hypothetical competitive llama5 model coming out tomorrow.
I'm banning my wife from ever buying any Alexander Wang clothing, because his leadership is so poor in comparison that he's going to also devalue the name-collision fashion brand that he shares a name with. That's how bad his leadership is going to be in comparison to Yann. Scale AI was only successful for the same reason Langchain was. Easy to be a big fish in a pond with no other fishes.
This sounds similar to the arc of Carpathy, who also managed to preserve his reputation despite sending Tesla down a FSD deadend and missing the initial LLM boat.
Is Project Genie a "world model" as defined by Yann LeCun? Doesn't "world model" mean that the model generates things from a theory of the world, rather than the colloquial meaning of generating 3d navigable scenes (using a temporal ViT or whatever)?
Isn't it more like this: JEPA looks at the video, "a dog walks out of the door, the mailman comes, dog is happy" and the next frame would need to look like "mailman must move to mailbox, dog will run happily towards him", which then an image/video generator would need to render.
Genie looks at the video, "when this group of pixels looks like this and the user presses 'jump', I will render the group different in this way in the next frame."
Genie is an artist drawing a flipbook. To tell you what happens next, it must draw the page. If it doesn't draw it, the story doesn't exist.
JEPA is a novelist writing a summary. To tell you what happens next, it just writes "The car crashes." It doesn't need to describe what the twisted metal looks like to know the crash happened.
You are beyond correct. World models is what saves their Reality Labs investment. I would say if Reality Labs cannot productize World Models, then that entire project needs to be scrapped.
Failures are not publicly reported, in general. Do you we know what they have invested in?
Most people don't like putting on VR headsets, no matter what the content is. It just never broke out of the tech enthusiast niche.